What Can I Do When PPC Gets Too Expensive?

This post was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on April 3, 2019.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

You hopped on the PPC express years ago because it was a legitimate way to drive traffic to your website and find customers. And it worked.

The trouble is, you weren’t the only business to start integrating targeted ads into your marketing strategy, and now the steadily increasing cost of PPC keywords is threatening to price you out.

What now?

When certain keywords suddenly move outside your budget, all hope is not lost. You can still help your target audience find you online with a strong content marketing strategy that incorporates targeted keywords into your owned content. Read on to learn how shifting some of your PPC budget to content marketing can be a cost-effective way to drive more impact.

Why the Cost of Your PPC Keywords Keeps Rising

The cost of PPC keywords is increasing in multiple industries, with some fields feeling the heat more than others.

The cost of your PPC ads depends on a lot of factors. When it comes to Google placement, the price tag is determined by factors including your bid, your website’s quality score, the seasonality of the term, and the level of competition for the term.

Typically, the more broad the keyword, the more popular it will be — and higher demand drives up the price. If you want to keep ranking well on Google Ads for popular key terms in your industry, you’ll have to pony up a lot of cash. For instance, as of this writing, targeting “insurance” means you’re looking at a whopping $54.91 per click. Commonly used terms like “loans,” “mortgage,” and “attorney” aren’t far behind on the price scale.

Over time, the increasing cost of PPC keywords can become prohibitive for a small or mid-sized business, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of options. You can maintain your PPC budget at the same level, and still boost your efforts by leveraging content marketing.

When you find keywords are becoming too expensive, don’t ditch your PPC efforts — supplement them with content marketing.

Finding a Solution in Content Marketing

When you no longer have a solid business case to increase your PPC budget, content marketing can be the answer — or, more specifically, creative SEO-focused content marketing.

Content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. Your SEO efforts will be more successful when wrapped in quality content that meets your audience’s needs; and your quality content will perform better when you incorporate highly searched keywords to bring in more organic traffic.

Best of all? You’re not looking at an extra price tag to start including relevant keywords in the blogs, homepage copy, whitepapers, and other content you already produce.

Of course if you aren’t using content marketing for your business yet, you will need to make an initial investment to get started. The good news is, the long-term ROI for content marketing tends to be much higher than the long-term ROI for paid strategies. This is because a content marketing strategy with strong SEO allows each piece of content to build on those that came before it, contributing to your brand’s overall rankings in search engines.

PPC is a Short-Term Strategy, Content Marketing is a Long-Term Strategy

Where PPC is effective in providing an immediate lift to your traffic, content marketing is an effective ongoing strategy for long-term success.

When you produce one piece of content, you can often re-use it many times over in its lifetime. A report produced with your company’s original data can be repurposed as an in-depth whitepaper, a blog post with key highlights, and a compelling infographic to be shared across social media. An interview with one of your executives can be repurposed as an e-book sharing industry expertise, a shareable graphic illustrating tips and tricks, and a blog post showing off your experienced team. Another reason good content marketing brings a high ROI is that when you incorporate relevant keywords into the content on your website and in your blog posts, those keywords continue working to passively boost your SERPs over time, with no added investment from you.

The folks at Contently believe that SEO will be the biggest driver of content marketing adoption in the coming years. Businesses will need to turn to content marketing to improve their rankings when they can’t afford to keep paying for highly priced PPC keywords. What’s more, it doesn’t have to be too difficult to show the executives at your organization that content marketing is worthwhile.

If you’re trying to win over your boss and earn a healthy content marketing budget, the proof of ROI is in the pudding — or rather, in the statistics. Businesses that use content marketing enjoy conversion rates that are six times higher than companies who don’t. One in ten blog posts sees compounding traffic, meaning the content sees more attention over time. Perhaps most importantly, the first five organic search results yield more than 67% of all search result clicks — far more users are clicking on top organic results (earned through strong content marketing) than paid results (PPC). In fact, a study by Enquisite showed that for every single click on a paid search result, the organic results for the same term generate 8.5 clicks.

How to Measure Your Content Marketing ROI

Of course, the reason many executives stick with a PPC-only strategy is that it offers convenient measurement tools. You can easily see the difference between how much you’ve spent on PPC and how many conversions you’ve gained. Getting executive buy-in for a content marketing strategy often comes down to proving ROI for blog posts, e-books, infographics, and other forms of original content.

There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you can measure to gauge the success of your content marketing efforts. The most important thing is to choose KPIs that connect to your marketing and overall business goals, and that you can act on through your content strategy. Some of the most common and telling KPIs include: number of content downloads (for an e-book, whitepaper, or other downloadable piece of original content), time spent on webpage (for blog posts and on-site content), and number of inbound leads over time. Remember that content marketing is a long-term strategy, so it’s best to look at these KPIs over the course of six months and longer.

It can also help to assess how your investment in content marketing compares to your investment in PPC. Here’s one way to compare the two:

  • Note an initial benchmark by recording how much you currently spend on PPC keywords each month.

  • Target those same keywords using SEO-driven content marketing.

  • After three to six months, look at the organic keywords you’re ranking for and the amount of monthly organic traffic you’re receiving.

  • Compare your current organic ranking and amount of traffic with how much it would have cost to gain the same results using PPC.

Partner with RelationEdge Digital Agency to Leverage PPC and Content Marketing Together

You shouldn’t ditch your PPC campaigns entirely — there is merit to paid marketing strategies. PPC sees results faster than content marketing, which takes a bit longer to ramp up. The best strategy for a business is to combine the two so they each raise each other up. One way to do this is to put budget behind your quality content to boost it in front of more eyes.

If your PPC spending is rising above your comfort zone, and you can no longer justify relying solely on PPC strategies for your top keywords, reach out to RelationEdge Digital Agency. We will help you craft a content marketing strategy that leverages SEO to get your business the visibility you want without the PPC price tag. With a combination of content, SEO and paid strategies together, your online success won’t be held hostage by whether you can afford expensive PPC keywords.

RelationEdge Digital Agency is a full-service digital agency specializing in content marketing, PPC, SEO, digital PR, social media, email, and marketing automation. Get in touch with our expert team if you want to drive more digital traffic to your brand.

3 Marketing Best Practices You Should Question

This post was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on February 6th, 2019.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

 How many times have you heard the phrase “best practice” when talking about marketing?

Best practices are often born of good ideas and good intentions, but the idea that one approach can be applicable to any industry, no matter how niche, is flawed. It may sound counterintuitive, but best practices won’t always be the best option for every business — they may just be the practices that are most commonly used at the moment.

That said, like any tool, when used appropriately and effectively, best practices have the ability to improve productivity and performance. The trouble comes when marketers rely on best practices out of habit, or without critical thought.

The trick with best practices is knowing when to use them, how to use them, and frankly, whether to use them in the first place. With that in mind, here are three types of best practices you should question if you’re looking to improve the marketing efforts at your business.

1. Unchanging Best Practices

The most dangerous best practices are the ones that don’t anticipate change. From new technologies to new attitudes, consumer wants and needs are in a near-constant state of flux. Businesses that aren’t ready, willing, and able to change with the times simply won’t cut it in today’s marketplace.  

Any best practice that promises results but doesn’t make room for growth is one you should always question. Like the best practice that once you’ve found a marketing strategy that works, you should stick with it.

While it’s great to get good results, you have to understand that the digital marketing landscape is ever-evolving. The approach that works today will probably need to be tweaked in the future — but you will only ever find the strategy that works in this moment through ongoing open mindedness, research, and testing.

2. Trending Best Practices

It’s easy to be taken in by the flashy best practices of the year, especially when other businesses all seem to be following them.

Perhaps you’re thinking about implementing a promising new marketing tool or strategy. Maybe you’ve started investing in your presence on a popular social media platform. But have you considered whether being at this cutting edge is relevant to your business, product, and audience?

One trend that we have seen is the drive to incorporate artificial intelligence or blockchain into a marketing strategy. Artificial intelligence can be a great tool, but not every company should be incorporating it into their marketing strategy. For example – AI works best when there is a large body of clean data to work with; it may not be the top tool for you if your data isn’t well maintained, or your marketing department is just starting out. A good rule of thumb is, if you haven’t defined how a trendy tool will support your overall goals, it’s probably not the right time to implement it.

Trying too hard to keep up with the Joneses of marketing can quickly drain your time and resources, which could be used more carefully on a more appropriate strategy. Whenever someone promotes a best practice as “the next big thing in marketing,” simply ask yourself whether it really is the best thing for your business.

3. Overly-Specific Best Practices

“Post no more than once a day on Facebook.”

“Blog posts should never exceed 600 words.”

“Include a keyword 10 times on each webpage.”

Chances are you’ve heard something along the lines of these best practices. After all, they can be hard to ignore when they’re presented as established facts. The truth is, a lot of these best practices are just the most popular theories circulating the world of digital marketing at the time.

It’s nearly impossible to come up with a universal number for all your marketing tactics and if you prescribe to these best practices, you’ll inhibit your own unique business voice, experimentation, and development. You need to try and figure out the right kind of numbers for your industry and your specific audience — and remember that they will change over time.

Ask the Right Questions and Find the Right Partner

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to marketing, and that’s a good thing. If there were a flawless formula, there would be no growth, no challenge, and no innovation. The trick is recognizing this opportunity, asking yourself the right questions about what you’re doing and why, and using the answers to your advantage.

As soon as you find yourself blindly following a best practice, take a moment to consider:

  • Why you are using this best practice

  • What evidence you have that it’s working

  • What the alternatives are to this approach

  • What would happen if you stopped following the practice

If you’re still unsure about the right marketing practices for your unique business, RelationEdge is here to help. Our full-service digital agency can assist you in content creation, digital PR, social media, and marketing automation. Contact our experts today to discover which marketing practices really are the best for your business.

Are You Prepared for Your Lead Nurture Campaigns?

This post was originally publisehd on the RelationEdge blog on October 3rd, 2018.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

Preparation is the secret weapon of lead nurture campaigns. Nurturing can be a complex undertaking, but it is an effective way to turn your prospects into leads ready to convert.

The Data & Marketing Association (DMA) reports that two-thirds of customers have made a purchase as a direct result of an email marketing message. Lead nurture campaigns make your email marketing even more effective by targeting messaging based on a lead’s behaviors. Nurtured leads produce on average a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads.

To create a successful lead nurture campaign, it’s critical to go into it with the right materials, data, and strategy prepared ahead of time.

In this post, you’ll learn how to prepare for your next lead nurture campaign, including:

  • Knowing your audience

  • Selecting a marketing automation platform

  • Developing the right assets

  • Getting the timing right

Knowing Your Audience

The first step in preparing a lead nurture campaign is to research your audience. You can’t persuade an audience to engage with your content or make a purchase from your company without first understanding their needs, interests, and motivators. Your CRM can provide a wealth of consumer data you can leverage. You should also gather any available data from other sources on your target market’s path to purchase, buying patterns, pain points, and more.

With that data, create customer personas. A persona is a fictional character you create to represent the background, interests, and emotions of your target customer. This helps you get into the mindset of your consumer: What are their biggest challenges? What drives their decisions? What feelings and factors motivate them, or turn them away? If your target audience is split across a few different demographics or backgrounds, craft one persona for each segment of your target customer base.

Use your personas to customize the messaging in your lead nurture campaign. For instance, you may present the benefits of your product differently to a VP of Operations than you would to a Business Analyst at the same company. These two personas will have different considerations and motivations when researching your product — a lead nurture campaign gives you the opportunity to cater your messaging depending on who you’re speaking to.

Selecting a Marketing Automation Platform

The right marketing automation (MA) platform is key to a smooth lead nurture campaign. MA allows you to segment your audience, score leads, schedule emails, and create logic to adjust your campaign actions depending on a recipient’s behaviors.

The right marketing automation (MA) platform is key to a smooth lead nurture campaign.CLICK TO TWEET

Which MA platform should you choose? This depends on the complexity of your lead nurture campaigns and your organization’s overall sales and marketing needs. When researching the available MA platforms on the market, it helps to ask questions about the tool’s capabilities and features, such as:

  • Can I preview my emails in both desktop and mobile view?

  • How smooth is the user experience for building emails? Does the platform provide pre-made templates I can use?

  • Can I create mobile-optimized landing pages?

  • Does the platform support social sharing?

The features of the platform are just part of the puzzle. In order to take full advantage of your MA platform, your team must have processes in place to define what you need the software to do. Take the time to craft a lead scoring framework, define parameters for Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for your company, and understand how your lead nurture campaign will fit into your existing sales process. This means your sales team should be involved in implementing your MA platform from the outset.

If it sounds overwhelming to get all of these processes in place and capitalize on your MA software, reach out to a professional consultant like RelationEdge. We not only partner with you to implement MA software and teach your teams how to use it; we also offer digital marketing services to help you strategize, execute, and manage your email marketing campaigns. Our team of technology experts and digital marketing specialists are ready to help you choose the right platform, design it to meet the needs of your business, and use it to send your leads the right messages at the right times.

Developing the Right Assets

A lead nurture campaign requires you to have content prepared ahead of time. Otherwise, what are you emailing your recipients about?

It’s important to gather all content assets that you plan to use before you begin the campaign; you don’t want to find yourself in a bottleneck, with seven emails planned but only three content assets published and ready to use. Start by outlining the primary goal of the lead nurture campaign and identifying what types of content are best suited to accomplish that goal.

Once you’ve identified the types of content needed, see if you have any existing brand content that fits those needs. Conduct a content audit of your existing assets — including blog posts, one-pagers, e-books, whitepapers, case studies, digital brochures, and more. Note which pieces of content are high-funnel and which are low-funnel. Identify pieces that can be used in your lead nurture campaign, based on the goals of the campaign and what you know about your audience (hint: refer back to those personas you created!).

It’s likely you won’t find all the content you need in your existing content. To fill the gaps, develop some new content assets for the needs of this particular nurture campaign. Asset creation is a challenging part of planning a lead nurture campaign, but working backward is a great way to plan. Start with the goal of one email — usually this is a conversion, like purchasing a service or product, or attending an event. Work backward from your goal: What messaging would persuade your audience to act when they open this email? What type of content can best deliver that message?

Just because you find gaps in your existing content doesn’t mean you necessarily have to start from scratch. Consider repurposing some of your old content to make it relevant for this campaign. You may have a blog post with compelling data points that you can turn into an eye-catching infographic. Or, perhaps you have an existing brochure with relevant information that you can turn into a more in-depth and informative e-book to share with potential customers.

Getting the Timing Right

Once you have an informed understanding of your audience’s needs and interests, a marketing automation platform, and the content assets to support your campaign — it’s time to plan the schedule for your emails. Successful lead nurturing means not just delivering consumers the right messaging, but delivering those messages at the right times.

Timing for a lead nurture campaign should be variable; that means the frequency of emails a recipient receives should change depending on the actions that recipient takes. This is why an effective marketing automation platform is so important. Your marketing automation software can send targeted messages based on the actions a recipient takes. This ensures that your audience receives content that meets their needs at the times when it’s most relevant.

Need Help Preparing Your Nurture Campaigns? Work with the Experts

Preparing for a lead nurture campaign involves multiple steps and as you’ve probably noticed, the bulk of the work occurs upfront, before you’ve even written one email subject line. If you don’t lay a strong foundation, your lead nurture campaign can’t succeed — you risk delivering irrelevant messages to your audience, scoring leads inaccurately, or scrambling to manually adjust the timing and frequency of your emails.

The planning and effort invested upfront pays off in the end. Research shows that businesses who excel at nurturing leads make 50% more sales and it’s reported that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

When done right, lead nurturing requires strategy and expertise. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. Partnering with a technology expert and digital agency like RelationEdge allows you to feel confident in your campaigns. From helping you implement and use marketing automation, to planning your campaign strategy and producing the right content, RelationEdge has a team of technology and marketing experts ready to help. Reach out to us today to see how we can help take your lead nurture campaigns to the next level.

How to Detox Your Content Marketing and Keep Your Brand in Shape

This was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on January 29th, 2018.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

New Year, new… content?

The first few months of the new year are a time when many people turn over a new leaf and adopt healthier habits. But it might be just the time for your blog to slim down, too.

To help you, we’ve developed our very own content detox guide, so you can take a critical look at your content marketing and get your branding back into shape.

Why Do a Content Detox?

Times change. What you published on your blog three years ago may no longer be relevant — in fact, it may no longer even be accurate.

On the other hand, there may be content you published three years ago that remains relevant and insightful, yet few people are reading it. Maybe that content needs a little love to bring it more attention.

With a content detox, you’ll be able to refresh, re-promote, or delete your posts to ensure your branding and thought leadership is on point. But to know what content you’re working with, you first need to audit your assets.

Create Your Content Audit

A content audit will show you which of your content is worthy of refreshing or re-promoting, and which can go the way of the dodo bird.

Essentially, what you want to do is build out a spreadsheet with the title, URL, and metrics for your blog posts. Common metrics to look at include conversion rate, time on page, and social shares. From these details, you will be able to identify your valuable posts which should be updated or re-promoted, and the content that is nothing more than dead weight.

Breathe New Life into Evergreen Posts

It’s easier to refresh an existing post than it is to write one from scratch. Lurking in the depths of your blog is some great content that receives lots of views, but could use another paragraph or two with updated information.

Be sure to update the original blog post rather than publishing an additional article on your blog, — a new post about the same topic with vastly similar text could make search engines flag your blog for duplicate content. And keep the URL the same, too — if others have linked to the post, you don’t want those inbound links to become dead links.

In the name of transparency, it’s also a good idea to add an editor’s note at the beginning or end of your re-published post. This note should state when the post was originally published and that it has been revised for accuracy.

Let your social media team know when you’ve updated these blog posts – then they can be sure to reshare them across your social platforms and drive new views to your updated work!

Remind Readers of Great Content

As you conduct your content audit, you will also find content that still shines, even long after it has been written.

Just because it was published a while ago doesn’t mean it should be forgotten. Think of ways to make more people take notice of these posts. You can share this content regularly on your social channels and use it in your marketing automation drips.

You worked hard on creating this content. With a little effort, you can get it the attention it deserves.

Remove Underperforming Articles

You may think having old, outdated content does no harm. Think again.

Content deep in the archives of your blog may no longer reflect who your company is or what it does. It may detract from or misrepresent your brand, and if that’s the case, it’s got to go.

It can sound drastic to advocate deleting content, but done right, it won’t have any impact on your SEO or traffic numbers. One company actually found that deleting 900 posts — an incredible 30% of its website — had very few negative effects.

Do the Boring Admin Stuff

These aren’t the most awe-inspiring tasks, but that doesn’t make them any less necessary.

You should always go into your backend and clean up admin permissions. Are there still people with admin permissions who have left the company? Maybe some employees have moved into roles that don’t require them in your CMS. Either way, you need to update your admin permissions. This is a quick fix that keeps your content safe and sound.

It’s also important to update links in your older content to drive traffic to newer, more relevant posts. For blog posts that perform especially well over time, you should consider doing this at least once a year. You may be sharing old content again, but you want it to lead your reader to newer content, too.

After carrying out these actions, you’ll have a brand new, trimmed-down blog that better represents your brand. Detoxing feels good, doesn’t it?

Why You Need a Content Marketing Agency in 2017

This post was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on September 29th, 2017.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

Does content marketing really work? Which tactics make it more successful? Is paid content promotion worth it?

To find the answers to these content marketing questions and more, we took a look at two content marketing studies from this year – Zazzle’s State of Content Marketing 2017 study and a collaborative study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs: B2B Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends — North America. Based on responses from thousands of marketers, these studies show what’s working and what’s not when it comes to content marketing.

If you’re a marketer or business leader looking for insight why you should consider hiring a content marketing agency, read on.

Insight 1: Content Marketing Works

Content marketing has earned its place at the marketing table. According to Zazzle, nearly 80% of marketers say content marketing is effective. The study from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shows the same result, with 75% of respondents saying content marketing increases audience engagement, 72% saying it increases leads, and 57% saying it increases sales.

This is great news on a few fronts. Marketers understand the value of content marketing, and they see its value beyond merely increasing web traffic. According to Zazzle, marketers are measuring the success of content marketing in terms of brand awareness (85%), engagement (83%), improved search engine visibility (71%), lead generation (70%) and more.  

Insight 2: Content Marketing Is Getting a Bigger Piece of the Pie

Now that content marketing is at the table, it’s taking a bigger piece of the marketing pie.

On average, Zazzle survey respondents spent 23% of their marketing budgets on content marketing. Not one respondent expected to invest less in content marketing in the upcoming year—in fact, 70% expected to invest more in content marketing in 2017.

Similarly, the CMI study found respondents spent an average of 29% of their marketing budgets on content marketing. A more modest 39% expected their investment in content marketing to rise in the next 12 months, while 45% thought it would remain the same.

It’s hard to explain the large discrepancy in how many respondents said their content marketing budget would increase. It may have to do with geographic location—Zazzle’s survey was conducted in the UK, while the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs surveyed North America.    

Insight 3: Many Brands Face Content Creation Challenges

Even understanding the importance of content marketing, and investing significantly in it, many brands find it a challenge to produce content. Of Zazzle respondents, 65% said they find it a challenge to produce engaging content, and 60% say they can’t produce content consistently. Similarly, almost 50% of respondents to the CMI and MarketingProfs survey said they had challenges creating content.

This is a bit of a puzzle: if brands recognize the importance and effectiveness of content marketing, why are they struggling to produce it?

Well, more than half of the respondents to the Content Marketing Institute worked on a small or one-person marketing team which served the entire organization. It’s no surprise a one-person shop would struggle to keep up with content creation. Sure enough, of those brands whose content marketing success had stagnated from the previous year, more than half (52%) said that they didn’t have enough time for content marketing.

On the other hand, 53% of those whose content marketing was more successful than the previous year said that spending more time on it was a factor in making it more successful.

Even for a one-person shop, it doesn’t have to be this way. Small marketing departments should consider asking for outside help if they’re struggling to create content. It doesn’t have to blow the budget, either — something as small as four standout whitepapers can make a huge impact.  

Insight 4: Too Few Content Marketers Know Best Practices

Only 6% of marketers are clear on best content marketing practices, according to Zazzle. Yikes! This shows a huge knowledge gap to overcome. There are tons of free resources out there for your team to brush up on everything content marketing-related, and conferences and webinars provide learning opportunities too.

If you’re among the 94% who doesn’t feel confident about content marketing best practices, take action to change that now. Given the importance of content marketing in increasing leads and sales, your business could depend on it.

Keeping Audiences in Mind When Developing Content Strategy

This was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on July 11th, 2017.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020.

There’s a lot to consider when developing a content strategy. Topics. Timing. Channels. Keywords. Approval process and workflow.

But the first step to an effective content strategy is identifying your audiences. Your entire content strategy flows from your audience. It’s impossible to identify and address the needs of your clientele without knowing first who they are, and what drives them.

The next time you sit down and develop your content strategy, take a close look at who your audience is, and why they should be interested in the content you’re developing. You may think you’re meeting their needs with your current content strategy — but after a deeper dive, you could come to realize that there’s someone you’re missing.

Develop Customer Personas

For your content strategy to resonate with your audience, you must have a clear idea of who your audience is. Customer personas make your audience real by sketching out important characteristics such as age, gender, location, hobbies, goals and values.

If you haven’t already developed customer personas, now is the time to do it. We have a step-by-step guide to take you from start to finish of developing clear, useful customer personas.

This may seem like a strange exercise, but it’s an important one. When you develop personas, you deepen your understanding of how your customer thinks. This understanding is invaluable when producing content that resonates with them.

Consider how your content will differ for a 40-60-year-old male golf enthusiast and a 24-35-year-old female music lover. The type and tone of content will be entirely different, and that’s why it’s important to develop customer personas and clearly identify your audience.

Consider Where Your Audience Is in Their Journey

When you’ve identified your audience, you can consider where they are in the buyer’s journey. Are they at the awareness stage, where they are getting to know your company and its products? Are they at the stage where they are considering purchasing your products? Or are they at the decision stage, where they want to become a customer?

These are important questions which determine the kind of content you need to include in your content strategy. If you’re looking to speak to the part of your audience in the awareness stage, it may make sense to focus on your blog and social media to get the word out about your company. If your audience is in the consideration stage, it may be a better idea to develop white papers, case studies and testimonials that showcase how your company and its products stand out from the competition.

Whatever stage your audience is at, your content strategy needs to guide them through the buyer’s journey to take them through to the final step where you close the sale.

Create a Content Segmentation Grid for Multiple Audiences

During the first step of developing content personas, your company probably had numerous personas representing multiple audiences. A content strategy alone won’t tell you enough to know whether your content is effectively reaching each audience.

For that reason, it’s worthwhile to create a content segmentation grid. A content segmentation grid maps your personas against the stages of the buyer’s journey to ensure you have content that speaks to each of your audiences.

Your content segmentation grid will look something like this:

Awareness stageConsideration stagePurchasing stage

Joe, 45-year-old golf enthusiastBlog post: using sunscreen on the fairwayCase study showing how your sunscreen doesn’t run in outdoor settings.Newsletter with special discount offerShannon, 27-year-old music loverBlog post: using our sunscreen at outdoor concertsInterview: musician on their scare with skin cancer and why they use our sunscreenNewsletter with special discount offer

Even in cases where the type of content is the same (such as the newsletter in the purchasing stage), this grid will remind you that the content itself should differ. Different tones and different offers will appeal to different audiences.
By conducting this exercise, you will see if your content marketing is too light or too heavy on a particular stage or a particular audience.

Appeal to Emotions

When you’re developing content for your company, you tend to want to tell your audience about the features that makes it special. This creates a content strategy based solely on communicating facts and rationale. While that may not seem like a bad angle to take, it probably won’t be as successful as using emotions.

Emotions are one of the most effective ways to connect with people, hold their attention, and build lasting relationships. Being able to affect your audience emotionally is what will make your content more engaging and your company more special. That means it’s not just your business benefits your content strategy should be focused on – it’s your emotional benefits, too.

Try to keep in mind the emotions associated with the different interests, values, and goals of your customer personas, as well as the emotions experienced along the buyer’s journey. That way you can create a content strategy to trigger the right feelings, at the right time, for the right audience.

Keeping different audiences in mind will help you develop a better, more robust marketing strategy to appeal to all your markets. Don’t neglect this important first step.

Three Types of Content You Should Consider

This blog post was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on November 21st, 2016.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February 2020.

Every quality content marketing strategy should include a variety of content types. While most marketers understand that a balanced mixture of content forms — like blog posts, videos, and social media updates — is the best strategy, it’s hard to move away from your own tried and tested types of content, to focus on new methods that you don’t feel like you’ve perfected. Even if you are feeling bold enough to conquer an unfamiliar content medium, it can be intimidating to choose which type of content to dive into, to successfully bulk up your strategy.

If you’re ready to advance your content marketing strategy by diversifying the types of content you produce, read on. We’re going to cover three content types you should consider adding to your strategy to separate your company from the crowd and attract new audiences.

Q&A Content

Engagement with your audience can go beyond answering comments on your latest blog post (which you should be doing already!). Question and Answer (Q&A) content is particularly useful because it gives users the opportunity to learn from your company, and you the opportunity to learn from your users. Look outside of your own company website for consumer questions that are relevant to your industry, product, or service offering; answering specific questions in detail helps establish your authority in a personal way. Let’s not forget that a particularly popular thread can also inspire an idea for a future blog post or infographic topic.

Popular Q&A sites include:

  • Quora – Developed in 2009, this Q&A site revolves solely around questions asked by users. Members can answer questions, and suggest edits to answers posted by other members.

  • Reddit – This forum-style site is organized into subreddits (i.e. subpages) about topics ranging from world news to its famous Ask Me Anything (AMA). Try finding a subreddit relevant to your target audience, and answer questions or post thought-provoking topics of your own to start a conversation.

  • HARO – Help a Reporter Out, or HARO, is a service that connects journalists with industry and subject matter experts. Journalists use HARO to ask questions to a list of possible sources, and then they use those source answers to provide quotes in their published articles. To start using HARO, sign up for an account and subscribe to email notifications in topics that are relevant to your industry and expertise. Be sure to answer questions quickly: many have short deadlines, and answers will not be considered after the deadline expires.

Infographics

Marketers already know that visual content receives the most engagement — but creating compelling graphic content can be a challenge. Infographics are effective because they combine attractive visual presentation with the high-quality information more typically present in blog posts, whitepapers, and ebooks.

The key to infographics is to use them to present concepts, data, and processes in ways that are easier for readers to understand. In this infographic by Sentek Global, for example, we can clearly see and recognize patterns in industry-specific data breaches; this complicated data would be hard to explain without visuals. Keep in mind that the best infographics present information that is better showcased visually than through written word alone — don’t make an infographic just for the sake of making one!

One of the main drawbacks to producing infographics is that they can be difficult to coordinate, as they require research, writing, and design; but taking the time is certainly worth the effort. According to HubSpot, infographics are liked and shared three times more than any other type of content on social media!

Quizzes

Interactive content is one of the biggest areas of growth in content marketing, and it’s no surprise why. Interactive content combines visuals, stories, and participation; engaging readers in multiple ways. Quizzes in particular are highly shareable pieces of interactive content, with quiz results being the most shared media type on Facebook.

Quiz results are individualized based on a reader’s actions and experiences, so they have the ability to produce highly personalized answers. The interactive nature of quizzes has also been shown to lead to higher rates of retention and learning, which is always a boon for a brand looking to make a strong impression. If you’re interesting in creating content that caters to your clientele in an enjoyable and memorable way, design a relevant and engaging quiz.

Making Content Work for You

Before you jump onto a new Q&A forum, or start researching data for an infographic, take a moment to consider the goals of your content, as a whole. While incorporating these new content types is a great way to increase leads and engagement, it’s important to understand how they will fit into your overall content marketing strategy.

Marketers often think of individual pieces of content, rather than an overall strategy and goal. While a visually stunning infographic might get shares, does it include the type of information or viewpoint you want associated with your business? How about those HARO requests you’re answering? From blog posts to webinars, every piece of quality content you produce should work for your business and not against it, to promote the perception you want for your brand. Make sure you evaluate why you want to include each piece of content in your strategy and what purpose it can serve. Only then will you be able to build the audience and attract the customers your business deserves.

 

How Our Brain Processes Different Kinds of Content [INFOGRAPHIC]

This was originally published on the RelationEdge blog on November 10th, 2016.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020.

How do you decide what type of content to use in your digital marketing strategy? The key lies in the brain.

The way the brain processes different types of content affects a viewer’s emotions and impressions.

You can use the way brain processes information to get the best responses to your content marketing efforts.

 

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Vulnerability and Transparency as Content Strategy

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, September 19th, 2016.

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020.

A few weeks ago, I spent a morning at a lecture for the creative community in San Diego. The guest speaker was Scott Lewis, the Editor-in-Chief of the Voice of San Diego, a non-profit local news organization.[1] The theme of the lecture was love, but Scott took an interesting approach to the theme; I thought I was in for a lecture about romance, but Scott surprised me, instead focusing on the importance of vulnerability, transparency, and opening-up to tell our stories.

According to Scott, vulnerability is more than feeling weak or feeling exposed; it’s about being transparent and open about who you are, what your goals are, and what you want from the world. Vulnerability in the telling of stories — news stories, content, or even conversations – is opening yourself up and being clear about what you are aiming for, why you’re telling each story, and what you want to receive from your conversations.

As I listened to this lecture, I realized that these goals of transparency and vulnerability could apply equally well when it comes to content marketing, and the benefits of creating a narrative about the most vulnerable aspects of your business. In a world of inauthentic marketing and advertising, being authentic and transparent in your content marketing is a way to stand out and build established relationships with your audience.

Vulnerability, Transparency, and Content Marketing

Good content involves readers and makes them interested in your company and your story. An engaged customer or prospect is more likely to think of and trust your brand when they are ready to make a purchase. This is one of the main goals of content marketing.

But often, when companies are developing a content marketing strategy, they focus on telling only the positive stories, the ones that place them in a good light. This makes sense, as you’re more likely to share things that show your company as a positive entity, and sharing positive news about your company doesn’t make you vulnerable – you aren’t likely to lose a sale if you share a feel-good story about your last volunteer outing, or your latest client win.

Do these rosy marketing stories embody the reality of any company? Most likely, no, they do not. A business is a complicated endeavor, with personal relationships, corporate goals, and a lot of behind the scenes mechanisms. Companies face real consequences if they release information that is proprietary, or tell stories that paints them in a negative light. Despite these realities, there are benefits to being transparent about your company in your content strategy. When transparent content marketing is a goal, there can be some terrific results. Transparency can be used as a way to break through the inauthenticity of traditional marketing, and build a community of like-minded people that see your company as a leader. With all of these potential benefits, you may want to weigh the risks, look at your content strategy and ask – is it time to become more vulnerable?

Transparency as Content Strategy

A number of companies have made radical transparency a large part of developing their content strategy and sharing their brand story. Companies like Buffer, Zapier, and Elite SEM have built part of their brand and content strategy around being transparent, and sharing the losses as well as the wins.

For example, Buffer shares the experience of working in a rapidly scaling company in their Open blog, which they describe as: “Our journey to great productivity, more transparency and a happier work culture.” Open is focused on what it’s like to run a startup, how they have developed their benefit plans, their salary formula, and even features a monthly financial report that shares revenue from the last month. It’s transparent – radically so – and it has been a huge benefit for the Buffer brand in building authority and authenticity with their customer base.

Buffer has also documented how being transparent has been a boon for their business. In “The Transparency Movement: What It Is, Why It’s Important and How to Get Involved,” Buffer tracked their financial performance and found that their transparent approach to their content coincided with a change in their revenue trajectory – resulting in greater profits over time.

Can we conclusively say that the transparent nature of Buffer’s blog solely influenced their earnings? No, but what we can say is that it did drive attention to the brand, and since they had a strong product offering, they were better positioned to drive revenue.

In “Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward” Buffer Founder and CEO Joel Gasciogne took radical transparency as far as it can go, and shared the mistakes the company made that led them to laying off 10 members of their staff. The post holds back nothing, goes into financial errors, management decisions that didn’t go well, and how that ultimately resulted in 10 people losing their jobs. It’s the perfect example of a company being radically transparent with their blog content.

Even in cases where Buffer shared negative news, the news was met with generally positive response (and a lot of media coverage), again positioning them as an industry leader, and making their content instantly engaging and uniquely informative.

Bringing Transparency to Your Content Strategy

The reality is, radical transparency like Buffer’s Open blog is simply not a feasible strategy for most marketing departments. The structure of most companies is not set up to share everyone’s salaries, share monthly financial statements, or even talk about some of the missteps behind the scenes; but this doesn’t mean you can’t make transparency a goal in your content marketing strategy.

Transparency, vulnerability, and truth are ways to build trust with your readers and market your brand as authentic. One of this biggest missteps in content marketing is to be inauthentic; inauthentic content is misleading, and assumes consumers aren’t well informed – and how could you ever expect success when you don’t treat your customers as an informed audience?

One way to avoid this inauthenticity is to be transparent in your content marketing. As an example, one of RelationEdge Digital Agency’s goals is to share expert advice and opinions with high-authority websites and their readers. We have been published on websites like Entrepreneur, Marketing Profs and Tech.co —  relationships we were able to establish by writing articles that shared actionable insights into digital marketing that we learned from our own experience working in the field.

When we first started reaching out with posts we had written, we found that publishers were more interested in what we had to say if we were authentic: when we gave advice without selling a service or our brand, and instead shared information and advice about our industry. When we were authentic in offering advice, we were able to show that we had valuable expertise to share with our community. Instead of telling our readers how great we are, we showed them, by sharing genuine insight, and proving that our company is engaging and informed.

Where to Start

If you have a goal of being more vulnerable in your content strategy, there are few small ways to start.

1.      Reveal Your Source

There is no harm in sharing where you gleaned your information – even when you are trying to position yourself as an expert in your industry. Experts are not only intelligent, but they are also well-informed. Being well-informed involves reading about the experiences and expertise of other people in your industry, and even outside your industry. Sharing an idea without sharing how you came to it is inauthentic, and poor practice as a writer.

2.      Tell People Who You Are

When you write a blog post, always include an author bio so people can find out who you are, and what makes you a trusted authority to speak about your topic.

3.      Make Interesting Stories Your Goal

Instead of sharing only positive news, consider sharing lessons you’ve learned by making mistakes, and (here’s the key) how you fixed these mistakes. Hearing what went wrong and how someone worked to fix it will always be more interesting than hearing about a win without the background. This will make you uncomfortable, and even vulnerable in some cases, but it will result in better content that resonates with readers.

4.      Be Transparent and Develop Content Around It

This is an advanced goal, but if you have buy-in from your team, think about developing content focused on making your strategy more transparent. Sharing your goals, how you are working towards them, and what you have learned is a great way to build authentic, actionable content that people are interested in reading. Make vulnerability a goal, work towards it, and measure the results.

[1] – Creative Mornings is a lecture series held in over 150 cities across the world, where creative people gather to hear a lecture from a community member about a chosen theme. (These events are held once a month and are a great way to meet other people in the creative community in your city – you should check them out!)

3 Ways Marketing Departments Can Clean Up Their Internal Processes

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, May 25th, 2016

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020.

We all want to find ways to become more efficient, especially when it comes to our professional work.

Marketing teams are in a unique position. Often responsible for dealing with the requests of several departments at once, effective internal processes are important to make sure no one gets forgotten and marketing staff don’t get overwhelmed. Effective internal processes won’t just work wonders in-house – they’ll also help you manage your relationship with your marketing agency.

An internal process is anything that requires you to go through a specific set of tasks to reach a certain goal. Whenever you produce a project, get approval for your work, or communicate with your agency, you’re completing an internal process.

With days chock full of these processes, here are a few ways marketing departments and agencies can streamline their tasks so everything and everyone work better together.

Develop Templates

Marketing departments often receive the brunt of the design work for a business or organization. Whether it’s creating a line of business cards, writing blog posts, designing product labels, or signage for an upcoming promotion, there is often consistency required between different marketing materials. That means you can reference old work when completing new projects. But wait – every time you forget where you put an old project represents inefficiency in managing an internal process. Every time a team member has to ask how to create a business card represents inefficiency in managing an internal process.

You get the picture. It’s important to create templates for different documents your team may need. It’s not good enough to just create templates, though. The rest of your team has to know where to find them. The replacement of hesitation with certainty when finding an answer means you’ve cleaned up an internal process.

The same goes for the marketing agency you hire for your business. Even if you’re asking them to do a complete overhaul of your marketing strategy and branding, the more templates and context you can provide, the better. Is there a way your business has always done things or made projects look? Giving your marketing agency access to this information will prepare them for success.

Create Request Deadlines

Creating firm timelines around work will help any marketing department run more smoothly. This can be done both within and outside the department. For example, if team members have requests for the marketing department, set a deadline to dictate the date by which those tasks must be submitted. Asking coworkers to submit a request for, say, the development of a new product brochure two weeks before they need it will prevent them from coming to you frantically the day before. Taking requests early will help your department better plan its workload and will enable your coworkers to look at potential requests with greater foresight.

While asking coworkers to submit their requests early, encourage them to rank that request in terms of priority. This will again help a marketing department better determine what needs to be done and when.

Keep timelines in mind when working with an agency as well – if you need something by a certain date, be sure to let your agency contact know well in advance. While not explicitly a deadline, you should also establish with your marketing agency the frequency through which you plan to meet, and the format of those meetings. Determining regular check in dates at the start and sticking to those dedicated meetings will save time for both teams.

Divide Work Wisely

After you have a nice tidy request system in place, make sure chaos doesn’t ensue at the marketing department level. There is nothing worse than completing a task only to realize your colleague did the exact same work. Duplication is the devil when it comes to efficiency.

Use a project management tool to keep track of tasks within the marketing department. These tools can take the form of visual pin boards such as Trello and Thoughtboxes or can be inspired by more conventional Gantt charts. When choosing your project management tool, be mindful of the system your marketing agency uses. Many platforms allow you to easily share content and feedback through multiple accounts, and being on the same system will help streamline your relationship. Whatever tool you choose, ensure everyone on your team knows there is a central spot they can go to find out who has been assigned a task and the progress they’ve made on that work.

Just as set timelines can work for departmental requests, laying out clear time frames are effective within a marketing department itself. Items produced by a marketing department usually have to be approved by different team members. Having work submitted a set number of days before final deadline will provide built in time for feedback and revision. If you’re working with a marketing agency on a project, ensure you leave appropriate time for their team to make any revisions.

In the end, ensure the internal processes developed for a marketing department fit in with those of the business or organization as a whole. Once you start streamlining these tasks you’ll be surprised how much more productive you and your team will become. Your marketing agency will thank you, too, and efficient internal processes will help you get more bang for your buck and have a better relationship in the long run.

7 Steps to Take When Creating a Content Calendar

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, August 29th, 2015

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020

If you write for or maintain a blog, you’ll know that one of the hardest parts of your job is to come up with consistent, engaging content. Posting regularly to a blog is one of the best ways to market your business and grow a community around what you do. In fact, companies who regularly post to a blog receive 97% more links to their websites than those who don’t. Those who update regularly over a long period of time see more results as well — blogs that have over 51 posts see an increase of 53% traffic, blogs with over 100 posts see an increase of 3x that traffic, and blogs with over 200 posts see 4.5x the traffic — posting frequently is key when you decide to host a blog on your website.

With that in mind, what’s the best way to make sure that your blog is maintained with engaging and informative content? A resource that we have found essential is a content or editorial calendar. A content calendar summarizes the strategy for blog content; outlining major themes, topics and resources for your blog. A plan of 1 – 6 months helps to create a long term strategy for what your blog content will be, and can be used to guide your efforts and plan how you will use your resources. And face it; having a written plan with due dates and schedules is one of the best ways to keep you accountable.

Since we’ve convinced you that a content calendar is the way to go, here are 7 steps that you can follow to build a content calendar of your own!

Step 1: Determine How Many Posts You Will Write

Before you start to develop a strategy around topics or themes, you need to know how many posts you are planning to write, and how often you will be posting. Hubspot recommends that bloggers try to post over 16 posts per month (4x per week), but for many companies, that schedule can be unrealistic. If you’re just starting a blog or just starting to post regularly to your blog, 1x per week is a great goal, though statistics show that at 10-11 posts per month is when you will start seeing the most traffic results from your efforts. If you have the resources, aim for 3-5 posts per week. If not, make sure you set a reasonable goal. Posting once a month is better than not posting at all, after all!

When determining how many posts you will be producing, don’t forget to consider creating different kinds of content such as: whitepapers, infographics, or ebooks. These engaging and informative types of content are read and shared more often than blog posts, and sites that feature infographics have 12% faster traffic growth than those who don’t. Keep in mind how many of your resources will be taken up by these types of content — infographics, ebooks and whitepapers are often longer, involve more research, and require graphic design assistance that blog posts do not.

Step 2: Determine Where Your Content Is Going

The next step of building a content calendar is to decide where the completed content is going to end up. Likely, much of the content that you produce will be going to your own blog, but you should also plan to contribute some of those posts as guest posts to important blogs and websites in your community. Contributing guest posts is a great way to build your brand’s authority, equity, and send signals to search engines and communities about your contribution to the web. Acting as a thought leader in your industry is a great way to build trust and respect with potential clients as well.

Determining where your posts will end up will help you with the voice and approach to each topic – after all, you would write differently for your own community than you would for someone else’s. Once you have determined a possible placement for a guest blog, be sure to make notations about their style guidelines and length requirements to your content calendar so you can minimize the number of revisions you will need to do to meet their standards.

Step 3: Develop a Theme

Now that you know how many posts you want to write and where you will be posting them, you can start developing content topics! One of the best ways to do this is to develop themes – a broad theme can help to guide writers and topic choices, and also create a comprehensive experience for your readers. For best results, plan out your themes for a few weeks or months at a time. This will help you to appear as an expert on your chosen topic areas (and after researching and writing multiple blog posts on a topic, you will become an expert!) and will also make it easy to refer to earlier blog posts as resources. You can also build on previous posts and create a series of posts, which can then be repurposed into a whitepaper or ebook — the possibilities are endless!

Step 4: Pick Individual Topics

Step four is to pick the individual topics for each blog post or type of content. Using the themes you chose earlier, break each theme down into individual posts, each covering a part of that theme. Think about how blog posts can refer to each other and how they can work together. Have some fun with topics too —throw in a quiz or an anecdotal story to add some personality to your blog and drive engagement.

You can also use this step to develop your headlines. Copyblogger has found that on average 8 out of 10 readers will read your headline, but only 2 of 10 will read the rest. Writing a great, engaging headline is a large part of having a successful blog, so take your time here and write headlines that will intrigue and interest your readers.

Step 5: Expand Your Scope

Since you don’t write the blog posts in your content calendar right away, you should write a brief description about what you want each post to be about before you forget. Include in this description the goal of each post, the questions that you will answer, and any specific notes about the content that you will need to remember later. Don’t count on just your memory; the more information you add here, the easier it will be for you to write these posts later.

Step 6: Resources

This step is quick, but vastly important — add links in your content calendar to articles, blog posts, and books that you will use when researching each blog post. Again, this will make it as easy as possible to start each blog post when it’s time to write it, and you won’t spend valuable time trying to find that one resource that you remember from weeks ago. Also, if there is more than one person writing for your blog, including resources will make it easier for other writers to craft the blog post you were envisioning and meet your expectations.

Step 7: The Most Important Step of All – Approval

If you write and maintain your own blog alone, you can skip this step, but if anyone else reviews and approves your blog posts, this is the most important step of all — gaining approval. There’s not much worse than spending hours of effort on writing a blog post about a certain topic only to find out that your manager doesn’t like the topic, and wants you to write something else. Avoid this by going through your finalized content calendar with anyone that has a say over what goes on your blog. Make sure that everyone has come to a consensus with what blog posts should be about before you start to work on them.

If you follow these seven steps, you should be well on your way to maintaining a frequently updated blog with interesting and engaging content! Do you use a content or editorial calendar when you write for your blog? How do you organize yours?

You Can’t Edit Your Own Writing: But Here Are 5 Tips That Will Help You Try

Originally published on the RelationEdge blog, September 24th 2015

The RelationEdge blog was deactivated in February, 2020

Anyone who has worked tirelessly on a writing project and has found a typo despite multiple edits, knows the ultimate frustration of writing: finding your own mistakes. This isn’t unique to just one writer, all of us have felt our stomachs sink just after we press send on the email; “Did I really just type ho instead of how? How did I miss that?”

The good news is that it’s not your fault. Well, not your conscious brain’s fault, at least. Research has shown that familiarity with what you’re editing makes it harder to see errors, and easier for you to miss obvious mistakes while editing. It turns out that part of being a good editor is unfamiliarity with what you’re editing—which is bad news for the writer that just finished a draft and needs to get it out the door right away. As novelist Zadie Smith said in her essay That Crafty Feeling “The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” With this in mind, how do you properly edit your own work? How can you change yourself from the writer, to the reader?

Your Brain Is Working Against You

The old adage “familiarity breeds contempt” is fairly accurate when it comes to editing your own work. The more familiar you are with what you’re reading, the more difficult it is to see typos, awkward phrasing, or any other mistakes. Your brain works against your goals, filling in the blanks and glossing over errors in your writing—it knows what you are trying to say, and will read what’s written as if it is saying what you want, whether it’s written that way or not. Psychologist Tom Stafford describes this phenomenon quite well in an article for WIRED: “We don’t catch every detail, we’re not like computers or NSA databases… Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

An article in the Journal of Research in Reading confirmed what many writers know through experience: familiarity with a text has a negative impact on detecting errors. This is bad news for writers, as no one is more familiar with what you’ve written than you yourself, making you the worst person possible to detect and fix errors in your own work.

In an ideal world, every writer would have an editor at their beck and call, available to review everything they’ve written before it’s published; but we all know that this is far from reality. Proofreading well means you have to trick your brain into thinking it is reading something for the first time. If the secret to editing is becoming the reader instead of the writer, what can you do to help trick your brain and edit your own work properly?

5 Tips for Editing Your Own Work

The overall key to editing your own work is to make what you’ve written look unfamiliar to you, or to approach it differently than how you wrote it – this will make your brain work harder to understand what was written, and make it more likely for you to see mistakes.

Print It Out

Reading off of a hard copy changes the way type looks and gives your brain more of a tactile interaction with what you’ve written. Something as simple as running your finger over the text while you read it can effectively change the way your brain interprets what you’re reading, and can be key to tricking your brain into thinking it’s reading what you’ve written for the first time.

Read It Out Loud

Using your voice changes the parts of the brain that process what you’ve written, and will make awkward phrasing and difficult sentences more apparent. An added benefit is that reading what you’ve written out loud will help you to see how the text flows: chances are, if what you’ve written doesn’t sound good out loud, it won’t read well on paper.

Read It Backwards

Starting from the last sentence of your work, read what you’ve written backwards. This doesn’t mean reading each individual sentence backwards word by word, but instead reading each sentence individually, out of context. The removal of context allows you to focus on each individual sentence, helping you see mistakes, and making your brain work harder to fill in the blanks.

Step Away

Sometimes taking a day or two away is the best way to see problems with what you’ve written. If time allows, give yourself a few days in-between writing something and editing it. Even better, work on something else – the change in pace will reset your brain and help you see editing mistakes easier.

Use an Editing Tool

If you’re pressed for time, try using a tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor to look over your work. These tools aren’t subjective, but they are very effective at pointing out when you can replace a complicated word for a simpler version, or when you’re using the passive voice (my personal vice).

Stop Your Brain From Sabotaging Your Writing

Ultimately, the best way to get results from your writing is to have someone else look at it. Whether this is a professional editor, or even just a peer, the perspective that a new set of eyes can bring to your writing will improve what you’re trying to say, and reduce the number of mistakes. Though we encourage you to ask for assistance when it comes to editing, these tips will help you tidy up your work if using an editor isn’t an option.